Frank Miller of the U.S. Department of Education said parents “must be the decision-makers in matters impacting the most intimate parts of their children’s lives.” Now there is a statement I can get behind.
Parents are the ones God gave the primary responsibility for forming their children’s moral conscience. The Bible says as much. Deuteronomy 6, Ephesians 6, the whole logic of the Shema — the instruction goes to the household. It does not go to the Department of Education. It does not go to a teacher who believes he or she has the authority to stage a same-sex kiss as a classroom exercise. And it certainly does not go to whichever well-meaning staffer at Graham-Kapowsin High School thought that putting vials of testosterone on a display table was an appropriate way to communicate God’s love.
The statement is theologically sound. The timing is political apparatus. And the gap between the two is where I want to sit with you for a moment.
The Department of Education announced it is investigating Denver Public Schools and the Bethel School District in Washington state — Denver over a teacher who allegedly required students of the same sex to kiss in front of the class, Bethel over a Pride-month display that included vials of testosterone. The director of the Student Privacy Policy Office cited parental authority as the governing principle. Both are being investigated under the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment, a federal parental-opt-out statute designed to let parents shield their children from school-administered surveys on sexual behavior. The Bethel display was the district said unauthorized, immediately removed, and turned over to the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office. The investigations, in either case, remain open. The mechanism is not protection of parental choice. The mechanism is federal authority over what schools are permitted to acknowledge about the students who attend them.
Let me show you the verse the parental-rights machinery would rather you not read in its surrounding chapter.
Jeremiah 7:9–10, NIV: “‘Will you steal and murder, commit adultery and perjury, burn incense to Baal and follow other gods you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which bears my Name, and say, “We are safe” — safe to do all these detestable things? Has this house, which bears my Name, become a den of robbers to you? But I have been watching, declares the Lord.’”
The preceding verses are the indictment: “‘Do not trust in deceptive words and say, “This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord!”’” Jeremiah’s congregation was chanting the temple’s divine authorization. Jeremiah said the chant was the cover for what the temple had become.
The parental-rights operation uses the same architecture. It takes a real biblical value — parental responsibility for the moral and spiritual formation of children — and relocates it from the home and the congregation to the enforcement machinery of a federal agency. The verse where this works most visibly is Proverbs 22:6: “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” That is a parental instruction. It is addressed to mothers and fathers at their own kitchen tables. The parental-rights operation reads it as a mandate for the Department of Education to open investigations into school districts over Pride displays. The text has not been changed. The jurisdiction has been changed around the text.
Where was this sentence in 2021 when the same Department of Education looked the other way while school districts across the country dragged out the pandemic shutdown — enforcing no deadlines, protecting no parent’s right to opt back into in-person instruction — and parents sat at kitchen tables watching their children fall apart? Where was it when this administration spent months building its list of school districts to investigate for gender-identity policies, rather than investigating the chronic underfunding of the schools those parents’ children sit in every day?
This is the same move the Christian Nationalist machinery has made for three decades. Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry have documented the architecture: Christian nationalism is political ideology dressed in religious language. The parental-rights operation fits the pattern — a political mechanism wearing the clothes of a biblical value. “Parents must be the decision-makers” sounds like the gospel. The actual mechanism is the federal government deciding what two school districts may display, teach, and acknowledge. Parents in Denver and Bethel did not ask for these investigations. The Department of Education decided for them.
The same administration that ended agreements protecting transgender students this spring is now investigating school districts for content affirming LGBTQ students. The parental-rights framework provides the theological authorization for what is, in fact, a political project — removing LGBTQ visibility from public schools. The “intimate parts of their children’s lives” that Miller invokes are not the family’s private domain. They are the classroom’s public acknowledgment that some students have two mothers, that some students are transgender, that June is Pride month, that a school can honor all of its students without the federal government opening a file.
Now let me be plain about the Denver investigation. The allegation — and I emphasize that it is an allegation at this stage — is that a teacher required students of the same sex to kiss in front of the class. If that happened as alleged, the teacher was wrong. Full stop. A teacher does not have the authority to require a child to perform a romantic or sexualized act as a classroom exercise. That is not curriculum. That is not social-emotional learning. If the Department of Education’s investigation establishes the allegation on the evidence, the teacher should be removed from the classroom and the district should face consequences. Denver spokesman Scott Pribble said the district was finalizing its response and did not immediately have comment.
Now let me be equally plain about the Bethel investigation. A Pride-month display at a high school included vials of testosterone that the district says were unauthorized and that were turned over to the sheriff’s office. The district has already apologized, already removed the display, already cooperated with law enforcement. There is no allegation that any student was harmed, that any student was required to view the display, or that any testosterone was administered to a student.
So we have one investigation into an allegation of genuine coercion in a classroom, and one investigation into a display that the district has already acknowledged was a mistake and already corrected. Both are being investigated under the same federal statute. Both are being announced on the same day by the same official who invoked parental authority as the governing principle.
Does parental authority apply to both cases the same way?
If parental authority means that the teacher in Denver had no right to require a child to kiss another student, then parental authority also means that the Bethel school’s administration — which discovered the unauthorized display, removed it, and cooperated with law enforcement — should be trusted to handle its own mistake without a federal investigation. The asymmetry is the story. And it is the same asymmetry that runs through this administration’s entire posture toward public schools: the federal government is the enemy when it enforces integration or civil-rights protections, and the federal government is the savior when it investigates the wrong kind of Pride display.
Let me read Romans 13:1–7 the way I used to read it — as a blanket command to submit to whatever authority sits in the seat of power, because the powers that be are ordained by God. I taught that reading for fifteen years. I taught it from the pulpit. I taught it in Bible studies. I taught it to young people who had parents in the pews. I taught it as if the apostle Paul had written a blank check to the incumbent government, and the only question a Christian could ask was which party held the pen.
I was wrong.
The Greek runs through verse 7, ending with the requirement that the higher powers themselves are “God’s ministers” — leitourgoi — subject to the standards of justice the prior chapters of Romans laid out. The governing authority is not authorized to govern unjustly. It is not authorized to protect its political allies while investigating its enemies. It is not authorized to invoke parental rights when it suits the coalition and ignore parental rights when the coalition’s donors want something else from the curriculum.
The pastors of the captured religious apparatus — the ones who have traded their prophetic office for a seat at the political table — read verse 1 alone, against verses 2 through 7, every Sunday. The text has not been edited. The pastors have been.
Here is what a consistent application of Frank Miller’s stated principle would look like.
Parents must be the decision-makers. That means parents decide what their children are taught about sexuality and gender. That applies equally in red districts and blue districts. That means a parent in a conservative jurisdiction has the right to opt their child out of a health-education class that teaches abstinence-only curriculum as if it were science; and a parent in a progressive jurisdiction has the right to opt their child out of a Pride-month display that the parent believes is age-inappropriate. The Department of Education’s job under the PPRA is not to pick which parent’s concern counts. It is not to investigate only the districts whose local politics give the current administration a reason to grandstand. It is to enforce the law — the same law, the same standard, the same evidentiary threshold — for every parent, in every district, regardless of whether the parent’s complaint aligns with the administration’s political coalition.
The true test of Frank Miller’s statement is whether his office will open an investigation in the next six months into a school district in a Republican-controlled county where a parent alleges that a teacher required students to recite a prayer the family does not share, or to attend a school-sponsored religious event the family’s faith forbids, or to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance while a sectarian invocation follows. Those cases exist. The PPRA covers them. We will see whether the Student Privacy Policy Office investigates them with the same urgency.
The Baptist tradition I grew up in — the one that formed me and that I still love, even as I name what it has become — has a deep instinct about the state and the family. It is not a libertarian instinct. It is not a Christian Nationalist instinct. It is the instinct that parents are the primary educators of their children, that the state’s role is subsidiary, and that when the state exceeds its bounds the church speaks. What the captured operation has done with that instinct is what it has done with every instinct the tradition has: convert it into a weapon to be wielded only when the party needs it.
The tradition’s texts are still there. The instinct is still sound. But the people who wield it in this administration’s name do not believe the instinct applies to the parent in a blue-state district who objects to a Ten Commandments display, or to the parent of a transgender child who believes the school’s affirmations are medically sound, or to the parent who simply wants the Department of Education to leave the local school alone because the local school knows its own community better than a political appointee in Washington does.
I love the parents in my congregational circle who genuinely wrestle with what their children are learning. That wrestling is real and it deserves respect. The Department of Education’s investigation is not that wrestling. The parental-rights operation is not the family gathered around a kitchen table reading Scripture together. It is a federal agency deciding what a school district in Washington state may display in a hallway. When the political machinery uses the language of the family to do the work of the state, the family becomes the temple — the name invoked, the authority claimed, the people inside told they are safe while the machinery operates around them.
The prophet watched and named it. The temple was still standing. The chant was still going. Jeremiah said: stop trusting the words and look at what is being done in the name of the words. The department that opened two politically advantageous investigations this week while children in the same districts — as their own districts’ data show — go without counselors, nurses, and functioning HVAC systems has not let justice roll down like a river.
It has let a press release roll down. And the press release and the river are not the same thing.